Fine-grained temporal action parsing is important in many applications, such as daily activity understanding, human motion analysis, surgical robotics and others requiring subtle and precise operations in a long-term period. In this paper we propose a novel bilinear pooling operation, which is used in intermediate layers of a temporal convolutional encoder-decoder net. In contrast to other work, our proposed bilinear pooling is learnable and hence can capture more complex local statistics than the conventional counterpart. In addition, we introduce exact lower-dimension representations of our bilinear forms, so that the dimensionality is reduced with neither information loss nor extra computation. We perform intensive experiments to quantitatively analyze our model and show the superior performances to other state-of-the-art work on various datasets.

High-speed and high-acceleration movements are inherently hard to control. Applying learning to the control of such motions on anthropomorphic robot arms can improve the accuracy of the control but might damage the system. The inherent exploration of learning approaches can lead to instabilities and the robot reaching joint limits at high speeds. Having hardware that enables safe exploration of high-speed and high-acceleration movements is therefore desirable. To address this issue, we propose to use robots actuated by Pneumatic Artificial Muscles (PAMs). In this paper, we present a four degrees of freedom (DoFs) robot arm that reaches high joint angle accelerations of up to 28000 °/s^2 while avoiding dangerous joint limits thanks to the antagonistic actuation and limits on the air pressure ranges. With this robot arm, we are able to tune control parameters using Bayesian optimization directly on the hardware without additional safety considerations. The achieved tracking performance on a fast trajectory exceeds previous results on comparable PAM-driven robots. We also show that our system can be controlled well on slow trajectories with PID controllers due to careful construction considerations such as minimal bending of cables, lightweight kinematics and minimal contact between PAMs and PAMs with the links. Finally, we propose a novel technique to control the the co-contraction of antagonistic muscle pairs. Experimental results illustrate that choosing the optimal co-contraction level is vital to reach better tracking performance. Through the use of PAM-driven robots and learning, we do a small step towards the future development of robots capable of more human-like motions.

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) provide a theoretically-backed framework for deep generative
models. However, they often produce “blurry” images, which is linked to their training objective. Sampling in the most popular implementation, the Gaussian VAE, can be interpreted as simply injecting noise to the input of a deterministic decoder. In practice, this simply enforces a smooth latent space structure. We challenge the adoption of the full VAE framework on this specific point in favor of a simpler, deterministic one. Specifically, we investigate how substituting stochasticity with other explicit and implicit regularization schemes can lead to a meaningful latent space without having to force it to conform to an arbitrarily chosen prior. To retrieve a generative mechanism for sampling new data points, we propose to employ an efficient ex-post density estimation step that can be readily adopted both for the proposed deterministic autoencoders as well as to improve sample quality of existing VAEs. We show in a rigorous empirical study that regularized deterministic autoencoding achieves state-of-the-art sample quality on the common MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CelebA datasets.

2005

We introduce two new functionals, the constrained covariance and the kernel mutual information, to measure the degree of independence of random variables. These quantities are both based on the covariance between functions of the random variables in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs). We prove that when the RKHSs are universal, both functionals are zero if and only if the random variables are pairwise independent.
We also show that the kernel mutual information is an upper bound near independence on the Parzen window estimate of the mutual information.
Analogous results apply for two correlation-based dependence functionals introduced earlier: we show the kernel canonical correlation and the kernel generalised variance to be independence measures for universal
kernels, and prove the latter to be an upper bound on the mutual information near independence. The performance of the kernel dependence functionals in measuring independence is verified in the context of independent component analysis.

We provide a new unifying view, including all existing proper probabilistic
sparse approximations for Gaussian process regression. Our approach relies on
expressing the effective prior which the methods are using. This
allows new insights to be gained, and highlights the relationship between
existing methods. It also allows for a clear theoretically justified ranking
of the closeness of the known approximations to the corresponding full GPs.
Finally we point directly to designs of new better sparse approximations,
combining the best of the existing strategies, within attractive
computational constraints.

In this paper we present a primal-dual decomposition algorithm for
support vector machine training. As with existing methods that use
very small working sets (such as Sequential Minimal
Optimization (SMO), Successive Over-Relaxation (SOR) or
the Kernel Adatron (KA)), our method scales well, is
straightforward to implement, and does not require an external QP
solver. Unlike SMO, SOR and KA, the method is applicable to a
large number of SVM formulations regardless of the number of
equality constraints involved. The effectiveness of our algorithm
is demonstrated on a more difficult SVM variant in this respect,
namely semi-parametric support vector regression.

We propose an independence criterion based on the eigenspectrum of covariance operators in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs), consisting of an empirical estimate of the Hilbert-Schmidt norm of the cross-covariance operator (we term this a Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion, or HSIC). This approach has several advantages, compared with previous kernel-based independence criteria. First, the empirical estimate is simpler than any other kernel dependence test, and requires no user-defined regularisation. Second, there is a clearly defined population quantity which the empirical estimate approaches in the large sample limit, with exponential convergence guaranteed between the two: this ensures that independence tests based on {methodname} do not suffer from slow learning rates.
Finally, we show in the context of independent component analysis (ICA) that the performance of HSIC is competitive with that of previously published kernel-based criteria, and of other recently published ICA methods.

Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 71(3):333-359, October 2005 (article)

Abstract

In order to apply the maximum margin method in arbitrary metric
spaces, we suggest to embed the metric space into a Banach or
Hilbert space and to perform linear classification in this space.
We propose several embeddings and recall that an isometric embedding
in a Banach space is always possible while an isometric embedding in
a Hilbert space is only possible for certain metric spaces. As a
result, we obtain a general maximum margin classification
algorithm for arbitrary metric spaces (whose solution is
approximated by an algorithm of Graepel.
Interestingly enough, the embedding approach, when applied to a metric
which can be embedded into a Hilbert space, yields the SVM
algorithm, which emphasizes the fact that its solution depends on
the metric and not on the kernel. Furthermore we give upper bounds
of the capacity of the function classes corresponding to both
embeddings in terms of Rademacher averages. Finally we compare the
capacities of these function classes directly.

This paper deals with an unusual phenomenon where most machine learning algorithms yield good performance on the training set but systematically worse than random performance on the test set. This has been observed so far for some natural data sets and demonstrated for some synthetic data sets when the classification rule is learned from a small set of training samples drawn from some high dimensional space. The initial analysis presented in this paper shows that anti-learning is a property of data sets and is quite distinct from overfitting of a training data. Moreover, the analysis leads to a specification of some machine learning procedures which can overcome anti-learning and generate ma- chines able to classify training and test data consistently.

Gaussian process priors can be used to define flexible, probabilistic classification models. Unfortunately exact Bayesian inference is analytically intractable and various approximation techniques have been proposed. In this work we review and compare Laplace‘s method and Expectation Propagation for approximate Bayesian inference in the binary Gaussian process classification model. We present a comprehensive comparison of the approximations, their predictive performance and marginal likelihood estimates to results obtained by MCMC sampling. We explain theoretically and corroborate empirically the advantages of Expectation Propagation compared to Laplace‘s method.

Several large scale data mining applications, such as text categorization and gene expression analysis, involve high-dimensional data that is also inherently directional in nature. Often such data is L2 normalized so that it lies on the surface of a unit hypersphere. Popular models such as (mixtures of) multi-variate Gaussians are inadequate for characterizing such data. This paper proposes a generative mixture-model approach to clustering directional data based on the von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution, which arises naturally for data distributed on the unit hypersphere. In particular, we derive and analyze two variants of the Expectation Maximization (EM) framework for estimating the mean and concentration parameters of this mixture. Numerical estimation of the concentration parameters is non-trivial in high dimensions since it involves functional inversion of ratios of Bessel functions. We also formulate two clustering algorithms corresponding to the variants of EM that we derive. Our approach provides a
theoretical basis for the use of cosine similarity that has been widely employed by the information retrieval community, and obtains the spherical kmeans algorithm (kmeans with cosine similarity) as a special case of both variants. Empirical results on clustering of high-dimensional text and gene-expression data based on a mixture of vMF distributions show that the ability to estimate the concentration parameter for each vMF component, which is not present in existing approaches, yields superior results, especially for difficult clustering tasks in high-dimensional spaces.

We propose statistical learning methods for approximating implicit surfaces and computing dense 3D deformation fields. Our approach is based on Support Vector (SV) Machines, which are state of the art in machine learning. It is straightforward to implement and computationally competitive; its parameters can be automatically set using standard machine learning methods.
The surface approximation is based on a modified Support Vector regression. We present applications to 3D head reconstruction, including automatic removal of outliers and hole filling.
In a second step, we build on our SV representation to compute dense 3D deformation fields between two objects.
The fields are computed using a generalized SVMachine enforcing correspondence between the previously learned implicit SV object representations, as well as correspondences between feature points if such points are available.
We apply the method to the morphing of 3D heads and other objects.

Support vector machines (SVM) have been successfully used to classify proteins into functional categories.
Recently, to integrate multiple data sources, a semidefinite programming (SDP) based SVM method was introduced Lanckriet et al (2004). In SDP/SVM, multiple kernel matrices corresponding to each of data sources are combined with
weights obtained by solving an SDP. However, when trying to apply SDP/SVM to large problems, the computational cost can become prohibitive, since both converting the data to a kernel matrix for the SVM and solving the SDP are time and memory demanding. Another application-specific drawback arises when some of the data sources are protein networks. A common method of converting the network to a kernel matrix is the diffusion kernel method, which has
time complexity of O(n^3), and produces a dense matrix of size n x n. We propose an efficient method of protein classification using multiple protein networks. Available protein networks, such as a physical interaction network or a
metabolic network, can be directly incorporated. Vectorial data can also be incorporated after conversion into a network by means of neighbor point connection. Similarly to the SDP/SVM method, the combination weights are obtained by convex optimization. Due to the sparsity of network edges, the computation time is nearly linear in the number of edges
of the combined network. Additionally, the combination weights provide information useful for discarding noisy or irrelevant networks. Experiments on function prediction of 3588 yeast proteins show promising results: the computation time is enormously reduced, while the accuracy is still comparable to the SDP/SVM method.

In recent years, Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) has been suggested for various image processing tasks requiring an image model such as, e.g., denoising or compression. The original form of KPCA, however, can be only applied to strongly restricted image classes due to the limited number of training examples that can be processed. We therefore propose a new iterative method for performing KPCA, the Kernel Hebbian Algorithm which iteratively estimates the Kernel Principal Components with only linear order memory complexity. In our experiments, we compute models for complex image classes such as faces and natural images which require a large number of training examples. The resulting image models are tested in single-frame super-resolution and denoising applications. The KPCA model is not specifically tailored to these tasks; in fact, the same model can be used in super-resolution with variable input resolution, or denoising with unknown noise characteristics. In spite of this, both super-resolution a
nd denoising performance are comparable to existing methods.

Our goal is to understand the principles of Perception, Action and Learning in autonomous systems that successfully interact with complex environments and to use this understanding to design future systems